Returning the Favor and other Slices of Life

Friday, August 01, 2008

So when some folks mysteriously disappeared from Google's radar last month with no explanation, it was a pain in the ass. Since I was one of them, it was a bigger pain in the ass. Since I saw my traffic cut in half in a matter of days, it really pissed me off. When I lost a couple of advertisers and some regular revenue to the circumstances, it REALLY pissed me off.

But now that the stakes have been raised, I'm starting to get a little paranoid. These might be unrelated issues, but when Bill, Otis, me, Nat, Mookie and a bunch of others that I'm sure I'm missing were disappeared from Google's radar, it was one thing. When the Good Dr. and others had their blogs frozen completely due to a "possible violation" of Google's T&C, I started to have an unpleasant thought - could this be some type of odd belated fallout from the UIGEA?

I know, it sounds paranoid. And the fact that there are non-poker blogs on the hit list seems to make it unlikely, but I'm gonna wear a colander in my motorcycle helmet* just in case.

2 comments:

Seems unlikely. I'd guess that the high traffic of Pauly's blog (especially during WSOP time) combined with the constant mentioning of poker sites, and poker buzzwords, and the advertising made him a target. That and he had a network of blogs set up that linked to one another.

Also, no one "disappeared". We're all just bumped down farther on the list. If you search for "Pokerwolf", I'm listed on the fifth page of results. I haven't taken the time to do so, but I imagine that everyone else is in a similar situation.

I'm with Astin. Either something wonky caused Pauly to get dinged or, if you want to go the conspiracy route, someone sent in a false spam report about Pauly's blogs.